Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
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Yep, Alexa devices are definitely a crutch that students of all ages can get all too use to leaning on. We are old Monkey, so when you and I went to secondary school more than half a century ago, we still had no affordable pocket calculators, home computers, cellular phones, internet, et cetera. Okay, we kind of did have a pocket calculator called a slide rule, but that would have been difficult to hide and use during in class tests! I really think all these gadgets are dumbing us down in many ways.
Think about it, now we have access to huge databases that can be searched by us from almost anywhere via a smartphone or computer. How many kids or adults who do school related research actually go to an academic library to do their research? Probably a mere fraction of those from 30+ years ago. I bet most young folks would not even know how to use a card catalog or any other research mechanism within an academic or public library. So our library skills have been greatly reduced--dumbed down.
Today nearly everyone has access to powerful mathematics calculator apps via smartphones. We no longer have to remember, nor practice, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and all the other simple math exercises we once had to do in our heads and/or with pencil and paper. Nor do we have to remember complicated calculus and physics equations as those can be done in the background simply by entering the proper data. Again, mathematically we are dumbing down due to the improvements in technology.
We no longer have to remember everything we can. We have had writing skills for 5,000 years or more that allows us to record data of all kinds. We have had physical libraries to house huge amounts of data and knowledge dating back to at least ancient Sumeria! Today there are huge data farms stored all over the clouds (internet) that we can access immediately from nearly any location. We don't even have to remember what we need to buy at the grocery store because we can make lists, and hopefully remember to take the list with us! Ancient pre-historic (before written language) humans had larger brains than modern humans, and that was likely because their memory skills had to be MUCH better than ours to survive. They had no Google maps to remember how to get to where food and water is located. They had no libraries. They had no ability to write stuff down. We do, and yep, this in my opinion has shrunken our brains, and dumbed us down as far as memory skills. No wonder Alzheimers and dementia seem to be on the rise.
And speaking/writing about writing, we no longer need dictionaries, thesauruses, or grammar books to spell and write properly because most devices these days have spell checkers, grammar checkers, et cetera. So technology improvements have dumbed us down in our language skills.
And especially for the younger generations, we no longer need face to face (in person) social skills because "social" now means communicating with nearly anyone else located anywhere in the world or low earth orbit in near real time, and we can remain anonymous if we want to while communicating with them. No wonder why governments and corporations, as well as we the people, can no longer adequately communicate with one another. As far as people and socializing skills go, technology has dumbed us down.
"
Good morning Dave, would you like me to screw up your life more today than I already have?"
(Reference to computer in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.)